For a panel tentatively titled -"Waves within Webs: Practicing and Teaching Composition in a Complex World"

Many of the concepts sustaining the discipline of rhetoric and compositionare founded on humanist assumptions of autonomy, rational production, andlinear reception. Yet two recent special issues of JAC, in 2000 and 2004,have called for new perspectives on composition that consider posthumanistand complexity theories as more effective means of accounting for how weare embedded in larger networks of information or what Jenny Edbauer callsâ€œrhetorical ecologies.â€ Such theoretical arguments raise critical questionsabout the production of texts in which the agency of the writer isrecognized as distributed and composition itself is seen as a process ofemergence.

This panel is interested in furthering this conversation and exploring thispotential next â€œwaveâ€ in theory. Thus, we are seeking papers that take updifferent perspectives on composition following the implications ofposthumanist and/or complexity theories of emergence. Papers would addressspecific concepts or practices (cultural or pedagogical) through this lens.Currently our panel has a presentation establishing the theoretical lens byre-examining rhetorical agency through these theories, as well as apresentation on one example of how such agency changes our notion of kairosas practiced in visual media. We would welcome another cultural example oreven a pedagogical approach to these same questions.

Please email submissions by May 1st to Kristen Seas (kseas_at_purdue.edu).